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Bike Bells Are Ugly and Annoying. This Titanium One Sings

Knog, the bike accessory company, has designed a new kind of bike bell.

The Oi hugs the handlebars like a bracelet.

The bell comes in titanium, aluminum and plated aluminum.

It comes in two sizes.

The design is meant to blend into the handlbars.

Prototypes of the bell.

The British inventor John Richard Dedicoat designed the bike bell in the late 19th century. His vision—a simple rounded piece of metal with a small lever the rider flicks to produce a tinny "ding"—has endured for more than a century. Despite its basic form and, frankly, irritating sound, Dedicoat’s design has become the de-facto bike bell for old beaters and sleek road bikes alike.

Hugo Davidson is not a fan of the bike bell. “No one wants to put a $5 Chinese bell on an $8,000 carbon fiber road bike,” he says. He's got a point. Davidson is the co-founder of and lead designer at Knog, the Australian bike accessories company known for its ubiquitous bendy Frog light. The company's latest accessory is the Oi, a bike bell that doesn’t look anything like a bike bell. It's a sleek bit of metal that wraps around the handlebar like a bracelet.

The bell is something of a departure for a company that has, since its founding 14 years ago, focused largely on lights. It recently introduced the Oi on Kickstarter and already has raised nearly 30 times the funding it asked for. It seems there's a big demand for a bike bell that actually looks good.

Most bells look like, well, a bell. Or a small hamburger. Or maybe a mushroom. However you describe them, they've always been the sort of thing that looked at home on a beach cruiser and nothing else. Knog wanted to challenge the iconic shape and improve upon its feeble ring. The designers started by looking at how instruments like the glockenspiel and xylophone create sound. “We realized when we started cutting up bits of metal and pipes you could hit one of them and it would make a beautiful sound, then you would clamp it to the handlebars and it would make a dull thwap,” he says.

Knog

To create the pure ding that Knog was after, the designers tested nearly 200 prototypes of different shapes and metals. “We wanted something that was a little more harmonic,” he says. Aluminum and titanium produced the purest ring (the bells also come plated in brass and copper), and the designers found that the curvature of the metal ring had to extend beyond 180 degrees in order to make a sound that was loud enough to hear. “The loudest bell would be so big you couldn’t put it on your handlebars,” he explains.

The curved piece of metal sits atop a flexible piece of plastic easily stretched to suit a variety of handlebars. Two suspension columns separate the plastic bracket from the metal bell so the bracket does not dampen the ring. Flick the spring-loaded plastic actuator and it strikes the metal, generating a very pleasant, and surprisingly loud, ding. And it's attractive too—even though you hardly notice it.

Judging from the reaction on Kickstarter, it seems that Knog has tapped into a design-minded community of bikers who don’t have to sacrifice safety for vanity, or put an ugly bell on their beautiful bike. Given that many cities and states in the US require cyclists to use a bell or horn—and Australia passed a similar law just law week—bells aren't an optional high-design accessory, but a necessity. And lest you think Knog had anything to do with Australia's new law—and the $300 fine for anyone who violates it—Davidson insists “It's great for us, but it was purely coincidental.”